Building contractors usually purchase their materials for a particular job from lumber yards or other suppliers of building materials. Typically, the contractor furnishes the supplier with a list of the materials they need, and the supplier assembles the order from the inventory in their yard. Contractor orders are customarily assembled into packages specific to the type of work a contractor does. For example, a siding contractor would require a package of siding materials, while a framing contractor would require a package of framing materials. These packages must be regularly shaped so that all the materials in the package can be securely strapped together for transportation to the contractor's job site.
Every contractor order can include a wide variety of building materials, such as plywood, lumber, siding, drywall, etc., so suppliers must keep a large variety of inventory on hand. This inventory is often stored in different areas of a large yard, with similar products grouped together. In most lumber yards, there is a central area where contractor packages are put together. Once put together, the packages are either carried to a pick-up area to be loaded onto a truck, or the truck is brought to the central area so that the package can be loaded on the truck for delivery.
Assembling a contractor package can require a substantial amount of time and labor, because the person assembling the package must go to different parts of the lumber yard, pick up the item needed (usually with a forklift) and bring it back to the central package assembly area. Because some of the items are unwieldy, the assembler cannot usually load multiple items in the forks of a forklift; the items could be damaged or fall off the forklift. Moreover, the presence of one article already on the forks makes it difficult or impossible to load another item onto the forks unless done by hand. For a standard contractor order, which may involve items scattered throughout the full extent of the lumber yard, assembling the package requires many trips to and from the central assembly area. This is analogous to a person grocery shopping without a shopping cart; such a person would have to walk from the checkout stand to where the item they wanted was located, bring the item back to the checkout stand, and repeat this process for every item on their grocery list. Such an inefficient way of assembling packages is detrimental to the contractor, because it takes longer to assemble their package. It is also detrimental to the supplier because it results in increased labor cost and increased wear-and-tear on equipment, such as forklifts, needed to assemble the packages.
In addition to the inefficiency of bringing all the materials to a central assembly area, there are problems in putting the package together once all the materials are in the central area. Each package is strapped together and carried on a truck to the contractor's job site. To properly strap the items together so that the straps hold the package more securely, and so that pieces of the package do not fly off the truck on the way to the job site, the items must be assembled into regularly shaped packages. This is a difficult task to do with a forklift. Thus, the person assembling the contractor's package usually must resort to unloading the materials from the forklift manually and carefully stacking the materials so that a regular shape that can be securely strapped will result. The need for the package assembler to keep getting on and off the forklift and to arrange the package manually add significant time and expense to the preparation of a package.
The problem of putting together packages with regular shapes is presently solved by the use of "splitting bars," which are vertical bars placed in the ground at the central location where the packages are assembled. The items in each order are carried to the central location, raised over the splitting bars and then lowered on the opposite side of the splitting bars. The forklift carrying the building materials then backs up and pulls the building materials into contact with the splitting bars, which aligns the edges of the materials to make a regularly shaped package. Although the splitting bars can be used to assemble a regularly shaped package, they still are limited by being permanently placed in the ground in the central area. Thus, a person assembling an order must still make multiple trips to and from the central area to put the package together.
There is thus a need in the art for an apparatus and method that allows efficient assembly of regularly-shaped packages of building materials.